Microsoft does deliver products just because they got flak from Apple fanboy tech- press. Windows 8 is over 110 Million installs, I am not sure what other product from Microsoft you are talking about SharePoint, SQL Server, C# 5.0 .. yes, when Google is spaming Y-combinatory with daily Go post, Microsoft is actually developing a language that is 10 years and evolving.
Re:Rethinking Ray Ozzie
by andrewflnr on Friday October 04, 2013 @01:34AM
(#6493888)
Go actually gets a lot more flak here than C#, at least in my experience. The comments on Go are pretty polarized: a lot of people love it, but a lot of others hate it for not incorporating modern PL theory or having a weird GC. When C# /.NET is mentioned, it's almost always positively, as a remarkably well-designed system, what Java should have been. It's just not as sexy as Go or Node or (to some) Haskell. I want to say it's almost invisible by virtue of simple competence, but that might be going too far.
I wish Microsoft would go back to their roots. That is developing software that runs on all platforms.
I think many would love to have Office available on all platforms.
Personally I would be thrilled to write C# with first class support on Linux (Mono is not close to having this yet).
I wish they'd write an official set of native MS SQL drivers for Linux, like they did with the PHP SQL drivers on Windows. Yes I know there's FreeTDS, unixODBC etc, but the level of faff getting it to work just so never fills me with confidence.
I'm happy that Linux doesn't have MS SQL drivers. The increasing cost of SQL Server licensing is the driving force towards PostgreSQL for many of our projects. The larger clients can afford the costs and seem to enjoy being treated as cash cows by Redmond.
And with Xamarin moving fully to Mac, Linux matters less for mono.
win8 has currently a lower adoption rate than vista. winrt is so great no one wants to build hardware for it anymore.
the components you cite, sharepoint, sql server, are bought by IT departments that went with windows. once you switch to linux you do not have access to those tools, regardless of their greatness. and yeah, most of those tools are bundled in CALs anyhow, Sharepoint without SQL server?
effective leaders deliver products that customers buy. ineffective ones write memos to other "leaders".